Food safety is a top priority for organizations. As noted by the CDC, more than 48 million Americans get sick each year due to foodborne illness, and over 120,000 are hospitalized. The agency also points out that challenges around food safety will continue to evolve thanks to changes in food production processes, supply chain options, and emerging bacterial issues, which include both new pathogen strains and antibiotic resistance. As a result, US food processing and handling companies need food safety assurance processes that help pinpoint potential issues and provide a clear path to effective remediation that reduce the overall risk to public health. The HACCP Plan, which stands for Hazard analysis and critical control points offers a solid preventive framework to help mitigate and control this risk.
Not sure where to start? Here’s what you need to know about building and deploying an effective HACCP plan.
What is a HACCP Plan?
A HACCP program provides a systematic and preventative approach to reducing biological, chemical, and physical food safety hazards encountered by food processors. These might include cross-contamination of machinery with known allergens or raw materials, the use of chemical products for cleaning or maintenance that pose health risks to staff or consumers, or physical concerns around current processes that put employees at risk of harm or increase the risk of compromised food manufacture or packaging.
By creating and implementing a robust HACCP framework, companies can take a proactive approach to food manufacturing that helps lay the groundwork for improved manufacturing, packaging, and distribution operations.
What are the 7 Steps of HACCP?
Effective HACCP systems include seven key steps:
1) Hazard analysis
Hazard analysis focuses on the identification and cataloging of key food safety and physical hazards. Areas of potential evaluation include the skill level of staff, the cooling and heating process, packaging and transport procedures, and cleaning routines. Hazards should be documented along with the potential severity of each possible outcome. This hazard risk assessment naturally leads to risk management — how can companies address hazards to improve overall safety?
2) Critical control point assessments
Critical control points (CCPs) are steps in food preparation and packaging processes that introduce potential hazards and that could be used to reduce risk if changes are made. For example, the handling of food without gloves is a CCP that could introduce serious risks. By taking action to ensure gloves are always used, the risk of this CCP is mitigated.
3) Critical limit creation
Critical limits must be established for each CCP. They must be measurable and observable and often include criteria such as temperature, time, pH, or other key food safety metrics.
4) Monitoring process establishment
Companies must also establish monitoring procedures that make it possible to determine if CCP goals are being met, both at the time of observation and over the long term.
5) Corrective action determination
If CCPs are not being met, businesses must determine and implement corrective action to reduce overall risk.
6) Validation framework development
An effective HACCP program also includes a validation or verification framework that determines if current corrective actions are having the intended impact. These verification procedures are critical to ensure ongoing compliance.
7) Record-keeping standardization
Finally, companies must standardize the implementation of HACCP recordkeeping procedures to ensure consistency across teams and departments — this consistency is also critical for regulatory audits.
How Do You Implement a HACCP Plan?
Implementing a HACCP plan starts by creating a dedicated HACCP team tasked with the evaluation of identified hazards and critical control points. Here, in-depth checklists can help food industry organizations pinpoint problems by assessing common areas of risk and concern. While it’s possible to build your own checklist from the ground up, this is often time-consuming and complex and can result in potential hazards being either missed or over-emphasized in HACCP frameworks, in turn putting both performance and food safety protection at risk.
Once checklists have been applied, companies must leverage collected data to prioritize hazards, pinpoint CCPs and develop processes and policies that reduce total risk. Reporting is next — businesses must ensure that collected data is accurately transferred into digital formats that align with regulatory expectations. One option is building your own reporting structure from the ground up — another is leveraging comprehensive auditing and management software tools that centralize and streamline the process of data collection, analysis, and reporting to ensure that all relevant stakeholders have access to key data on demand.
30+ Audit and inspection checklists free for download.
What’s the Difference Between HACCP and ISO 22000?
While HACCP and ISO 22000 have a similar focus, they’re not identical.
The principles of HACCP were first developed by NASA in the 1960s as a framework to produce risk-free food for astronauts — understandably, foodborne illness in space could pose serious problems for mission success and the overall health of shuttle crews. ISO 22000, meanwhile, was developed in 2005 as a way to standardize fragmented food safety management systems (FSMS) used by companies worldwide. It is now the most popular voluntary standard adopted by businesses to reduce food safety risks to an acceptable level.
But what does this mean in practice?
Put simply, while the application of HACCP principles provides a safety management framework for businesses to improve food safety assurance, ISO 22000 lays out a set of standards that businesses should meet to ensure safe food and production processes. In other words, ISO 22000 offers an end goal, while HACCP offers a pathway to achieve that goal. As a result, HACCP plans are often used as part of ISO 22000 standardization efforts because they provide a way to pinpoint key problems and develop effective resolutions.
Enhancing Food Safety with HACCP Plans
HACCP plans are an essential component in reducing risk and increasing food service and safety assurance. By applying the seven steps of HACCP, bolstering them with in-depth checklists, and streamlining processes with robust reporting and auditing software, businesses can stay ahead of food safety issues and ensure they stay aligned with evolving regulatory obligations.
Ready to reduce risk and improve food safety program reporting? Enhance your HACCP efforts with Certainty.
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